Over the last three decades, the whole project of epistemology has been subjected to criticism
and change. This process has been marked, successively, by the transfer of epistemic sovereignty
to the “social” domain, by the rediscovery of ontology and by attention to constitutive
normativity and the political implications of knowledge. Some have even suggested that
epistemology should be abandoned altogether as a philosophical project. However, this process
has been offset by a proposal for a new epistemology, rooted in the experiences of the global
South. This article explores the possibilities of creating a space for dialogue between the various
critiques (“naturalist,” feminist, postcolonialist, epistemographic, epistopic, etc) of epistemology
as a philosophical project, and Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s proposal for an epistemology of the
South, taking as a starting point a review of philosophical pragmatism as the most radical form of
criticism of conventional epistemology.; Article published in RCCS 80 (March 2008)